Things to do in London this weekend (11-12 October)

This year’s BFI London Film Festival will kick off on Wednesday, with Rian Johnson’s new Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery at the Royal Festival Hall. From there, the UK’s biggest film festival will be pressing play on 11 days and nights of movies, big and small, at cinemas and venues across London. Very much not a festival that’s just for the critics, snobs and VIPs, the LFF remains the most accessible of the world’s big film festivals. Which means you’ve got every chance of scoring seats to its packed line-up of new movies when tickets go on sale on September 16 (earlier for BFI members). 

If you’re looking for a brunch spot that’ll impress your date far more than a fancy Mayfair restaurant, Aram is the one. The eastern Mediterranean café is the latest venture from chef Imad Alarnab, who fled wartorn Syria a decade ago, before opening Imad’s Syrian Kitchen in Soho. At Aram you can taste the rich flavours of his homeland in everything from zaatar croissants, to olive and feta danishes. Set in the grand Somerset House, you’ll feel like you’re eating inside a stately home, with tall ceilings and huge windows flooding the room with light.

At the National Theatre last Christmas, Max Webster’s vividly queer take on Oscar Wilde’s magnum opus featured Ncuti Gatwa as the dashing young protagonist Algernon Montcrieff. In this West End Cast Gatwa’s replacement is fellow Russell T Davies alumnus Ollie Alexander, and he plays Algie with a waspish dandyishness that feels childish, not adult, a little boy roleplaying his whirlwind romance with Jessica Whitehurst’s bolshy Cicily. Likewise, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett‘s Jack is basically a gigantic overgrown puppy, wagging his tail in delight at the attentions of Kitty Hawthorn’s Gwendolyn, but with zero sexual intent. It’s a funny, fresh, irreverent way of tackling Wilde’s comedy. 

One hundred years ago, a strange curtained box appeared on Broadway in New York City. If you went inside and slotted in 25 cents, you’d emerge with eight sepia tinged photos of yourself in a matter of minutes. It was the Photomaton – the world’s first fully automated photobooth. Fast forward to the 21st century and photobooths are in bars, train stations, cinemas, record shops and on streets all over the world. The Photographer’s Gallery is marking a century of the machines with Click!, an archival exhibition exploring their imperfections, their quirks and their most famous fans. Naturally, there’ll be a working photobooth for visitors to take their own snap.

‘Nigerian Modernism’ celebrates the achievements of Nigerian artists working on either side of a decade of independence from British colonial rule in 1960. As well as traversing networks in the country’s locales of Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos and Enugu, it also looks further afield to London, Munich and Paris, exploring how artistic collectives fused Nigerian, African and European techniques and traditions in their multidimensional works.

Hiran Abeysekera begins Robert Hastie’s production of Hamlet as a sardonic, melancholy prince who feels adrift in life after the sudden death of his dad and the even more sudden remarriage of his mum Gertrude to his uncle Claudius. Then he meets his father’s vengeful ghost and suddenly we have a problem. The prince tells his friends that he’s going to pretend to be insane for a bit while he investigates the spirit’s allegations that Claudius killed his father, but the madcap cackle he emits as he says this gives away the game. He is genuinely nuts, or at best, the ghost has radicalised him into a single-minded path in which he turns his back on his loved ones in pursuit of revenge. Abeysekera is tremendously entertaining, and this is a fun, imaginative take on the classic. 

Triangle of Sadness and Babygirl breakout star Harris Dickinson steps behind the camera for a bruising, brilliantly strange debut that channels veteran auteurs like Jonathan Glazer and Andrea Arnold, while carving out a distinctive voice all its own. Written by Dickinson himself, Urchin draws on his experiences growing up around people dealing with addiction and mental illness. It lulls you into a sense of comfort before punching you hard in the ribs. Already an actor of note, the princely Urchin crowns Dickinson as a serious new filmmaking voice too.

Vistors will be plunged into Candice Lin’s ghoulish, red hued world at Whitechapel Gallery this October, as the artist’s new commission inspired by the politcal and cultural upheaval in the USA goes on display. Created in Los Angeles during the the inauguration of Donald Trump’s second presidency, and the LA wildfires, Lin’s hellish and labrythine landscapes – where small creatures stand beneath towering monoliths, and human cadavers emerge from behind shrubberies – evoke the shock, grief and helplessness many Americans feel today in the face of genocide, police brutality and a climate catastrophe. 

Do you spend your time in London seeking out the best dirty martini? Or judging every barman by their daquri-making skills? Then get yourself to London Cocktail Week where the city’s inventive and innovative cocktail makers will be shaking up exciting and unusual concoctions to sink back. Over 200 bars across the capital will take part, including Nipperkin, Seed Library and Swift. Pick up a wristband in advance, or at any participating bar, and sip your way around London, tasting tried-and-trusted classics and new recipes. The event is all not-for-profit, with funds being redirected back to the bars involved, helping support the people behind the drinks.

Hammersmith arts centre Riverside Studios is going all out for Black History Month this year, with a line-up that spans films, community creative workshops, and spotlight evenings. The programme includes a scratch night (October 6; November 3) for emerging theatremakers and writers, as well as a work-in-progress showing of immersive experience Doubles (October 11), which follows two Grenadians navigating the British class system. The program is rounded out with djembe drumming workshops for both kids and adults (October 11-12).

It’s not that long ago that British art bigwigs Gilbert & George grew so frustrated with what they saw as a lack of attention from the UK’s art institutions that they set up their very own museum dedicated to themselves. That big whinge seems a bit premature now that the Hayward is giving them a big exhibition looking at their work since the turn of the millennium, a period that has seen them satirising everything from hope and fear to sex and religion.

One of Hollywood’s biggest stars in a true-life sports movie with big-time awards hopes. It’s going to be a Rocky-like story of comeback glory wrenched from the jaws of defeat, right? Except that’s not at all what Dwayne Johnson and director Benny Safdie have got cooking with this tender but tumultuous addiction and relationship drama set in the gladiatorial world of mixed martial arts (MMA). Because beyond the regular crunch of fist on bone, The Smashing Machine is an unexpectedly gentle, soulful character study that has Johnson undercutting his crowd-pleasing ‘The Rock’ persona with vulnerability and boyish uncertainty. Inside this smashing machine is a deeply heartsore human – and inside Johnson is a very fine actor indeed. 

This is London’s biggest Diwali event and one not to be missed. Around 35,000 revellers descend on Trafalgar Square to celebrate the Hindu, Sikh and Jain Festival of Light, where you’ll find a sensory kaleidoscope of activities. The full programme for this year’s festival is yet to be announced, but expect it to be a vibrant affair.

Peter Doig is one of the greatest living painters, an artist whose approach to hazy, memory-drenched figuration has had an enormous impact on the visual landscape of today. For his show at the Serpentine, he’s going well beyond the canvas, filling the gallery with speaker systems to explore the impact of music on his work. Does DJ-set-meets-art-exhibition sound like your idea of hell? Mine too, but it’s Doig, so it just might work. Maybe.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth film begins at the US-Mexico border, where a gang of revolutionaries prepare to free hundreds of detained immigrants. It’s the early noughts and righteous firebrand Perfidia Beverly Hills (an indelible Teyana Taylor) steps into the fray, and so starts a mighty 162 minutes of danger, comedy, excitement, love, sex and confusion. The first hour flies by as our rebel pairing shoot guns, rob banks and blow up power lines. Perfidia gives birth to daughter Willa but can’t commit to motherhood and the revolution, leaving Pat holding the baby in both senses. There are so many inspired moments, scenes and sequences here, it’s impossible to pick a standout. In a decade or two, when the great New Hollywood directors of the 1970s are gone, Anderson might be the greatest living American director. This is a formidable piece of work.

Charge the steins! You don’t have to travel all the way to Germany for a lederhosen-clad knees-up this Oktoberfest – and you don't even have to wait until October. Munich’s world-famous beer festival is very much on in London with big steins of beer, platters of excessively long wurst and loud oompah bands blowing brass like they don’t give a schnitzel. You’re sure to get a warm willkommen at one of these London Oktoberfest events. 

This huge show at Tate Britain is the most extensive retrospective of Lee Miller’s photography in the UK, celebrating the trailblazing surrealist as one of the 20th century’s most urgent artistic voices. Around 250 vintage and modern prints will be on display – including some previously unseen gems – capturing the photographer’s vision and spirit.

London Month Of The Dead’s annual programme returns this spooky season to get you in the mood for Halloween with a programme of more than 60 fascinatingly macabre events investigating our city’s relationship with death. The line-up offers a plethora of ghostly tours that will take you around crypts, cemeteries, undertakers, execution sites and other eerie locations across the city, alongside talks exploring everything from the study of human decomposition and the psychology of fear to the theme of murder in art. There’s also an immersive workshop where you can try your hand at some forensic anthropology and a screening of the original Nosferatu with live musical accompaniment. 

American writer Samuel D. Hunter’s 2015 play, making its UK debut at Trafalgar Theatre, isn’t big on laughs. Heartstopper’s Joe Locke is Jake. Just diagnosed with the degenerative Huntington’s disease and dumped by his boyfriend, he’s run away to Clarkston, Washington, so named after his distant ancestor, where he meets the brooding Chris (Ruaridh Mollica), who is saving to go to college while dealing with his meth-addicted mother, Trish (Sophie Melville), and the pair form a complicated bond. It’s a play about how people can become stuck in small-town America, the doubts that lurk beneath people’s hopes, and how life can fall short.

Aussie director Simon Stone’s The Lady from the Sea is based on Ibsen’s 1888 drama of the same name, and shares its basic plot beats while tinkering with much of the underlying characterisation and motives. It’s a starry production: Edward (Andrew Lincoln) is a wealthy neurosurgeon married to his second wife Ellida (Alicia Vikander), a successful writer. They live with Edward’s two pathologically precocious daughters from his first marriage: Asa (Grace Oddie-Jones) and Hilda (Isobel Akuwudike). Stone is a real throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks guy and he excavates some interesting, complex stuff on consent, memory and the controlling nature of men. 

From Vivienne Westwood’s mud-inspired collection, to Acne Studio’s stained jeans, the autumn exhibition at the Barbican traces fashion’s obsession with all things dirty, grimy and messy. That’s right. Through the collections of more than 60 designers from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion will take a look at everything from models wrestling in mud at New York fashion week, to Hussein Chalayan’s dresses buried underground, and the newish trend, hailing from Copenhagen, ‘bogcore’. Containing pieces from Paco Rabane, Dilara Findikoglu, Maison Margiela, Issey Miyake and Alexander McQueen, Dirt’s lineup promises to give a comprehensive look at the grubbier side of clothing design, with enough to impress any fashion lover. 

Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel is a tiny bit like a British feminist version of The Lehman Trilogy, if the three Lehman brothers were replaced by the Roman siblings - three seemingly immortal, semi-allegorical, deeply damaged brothers whose brutal childhoods in the Victorian era have disastrous consequences for the next 150 years of humanity. It’s a bleakly irrelevant epic drama with a touch of Pyncheon-esque humour that centres on Kyle Soller’s Jack – undoubtedly the protagonist – plus his brothers: Marlow (Oliver Johnstone) and Edmund (Stuart Thompson). Birch weaves a deft path – you can see it as a parable about toxic masculinity without feeling lectured to. In many ways the message is simple: messed up men running society messes society up. But it’s the writing that dazzles: surreal, savage and at times startlingly empathetic. 

London’s cultural institutions are having a love affair with the New Romantics this year. Now it’s the Design Museum’s turn to direct its attention towards the most flamboyant subculture of its era, via this exhibition on the Blitz club, the iconic (and we really don’t use that word lightly) Covent Garden nightclub where New Romanticism was born in 1979. Forty years after it closed, the trailblazing club’s atmosphere will be recreated through a ‘sensory extravaganza’ incorporating music, film, art, graphic design and some very ostentatious outfits. This will include several items that have never been on public display before, while some of the scene’s key figures have been involved in the development of the exhibition. Time to liberally apply the kohl eyeliner, fish out your frilliest shirt and whack on some Spandau Ballet: the 80s are back, baby!

Love sushi, dumplings or noodles? Inamo’s got you covered. This high-tech spot in Soho or Covent Garden lets you order from interactive tabletops, play over 20 games while you wait and even doodle on your table. Then it’s all you can eat pan-Asian dishes like Sichuan chicken, red dragon rolls and Korean wings with bottomless drinks. Usually £113.35, now just £33 or £26 if you're in early at the weekend!

Get Inamo’s best ever bottomless food & drink brunch from only £26 with Time Out Offers.

Kerry James Marshall is an artist with a singular vision. He has become arguably the most important living American painter over the past few decades, with an ultra-distinctive body of work that celebrates the Black figure in an otherwise very ‘Western’ painting tradition. This big, ambitious show will be a joyful celebration of his lush, colourful approach to painting.

Fashion lovers will lose their heads over the V&A’s big autumn exhibition, focusing as it does on the sartorial tastes of one of history’s most notable bonce droppers. Marie Antoinette Style will look at the ill-fated French queen’s enduring impact on fashion, design and culture, as well as ‘the origins and countless revivals of the style shaped by the most fashionable queen in history’. The V&A’s art collection features two portraits of Antoinette by Jean-François Janinet and François Hubert Drouais which we’d imagine will feature in the exhibition, while visitors can also expect to get up close to some serious couture pieces too; Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, Moschino, Dior and the exhibition’s sponsor Manolo Blahnik have all created past collections inspired by the guillotined French Revolution monarch. Let them eat ’fits!

★★★★ 'Frameless has managed to create something genuinely exciting' – Time Out

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined beyond belief, through cutting-edge technology. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score. Enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more for just £24!

Get £24.80 tickets (originally £31), only through Time Out Offers.

The V&A East Storehouse opened in May this year. Spoiler: it’s amazing. But visitors have had to wait a bit longer for the arrival of the massive David Bowie archive containing more than 80,000 items and spanning six decades of the life of Ziggy Stardust. Now, the David Bowie Centre will officially open on Thursday September 13, with opening exhibits curated by BRIT-winning indie band The Last Dinner Party and living musical legend Nile Rodgers. Rodgers, who produced Bowie’s albums Let’s Dance and Black Tie White Noise has selected items including personal correspondence between himself and Bowie, a bespoke Peter Hall suit worn by Bowie during the Serious Moonlight tour and Chuck Pulin photographs of Bowie, Rodgers and guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan recording Let's Dance in New York. The free-to-enter gallery will have nine displays showing everything from photographs to clothing, and drawings, and will include insights into unrealised projects.

Imagine indulging in all the dumplings, rolls, and buns you can handle, crafted by a Chinatown favourite with over a decade of culinary excellence. Savour Taiwanese pork buns, savoury pork and prawn soup dumplings, and luxurious crab meat xiao long bao. To top it off, enjoy a chilled glass of prosecco to elevate your feast. Cheers to a truly delightful dining experience at Leong’s Legend!